Language preferences

When you click the preferences button at the top of the page you will
be able to change some features of the interface to suit your own requirements.

Each collection has a default presentation language, but you can switch to
a different language if you like. You can also alter the encoding scheme
used by Greenstone for output to the browser -- the software chooses
sensible defaults, but with some browsers better visual results can be used
by switching to a different encoding scheme. All collections allow you to
switch from the standard graphical interface format to a textual one. This
is particularly useful for visually impaired users who use large screen
fonts or speech synthesizers for output.

Searching

Search terms

Whatever you type into the query box is interpreted as a list of words
called "search terms." Each term contains nothing but alphabetic characters
and digits. Terms are separated by white space. If any other characters such
as punctuation appear, they serve to separate terms just as though they were
spaces. And then they are ignored. You can't search for words that include
punctuation.

For example, the query

Agro-forestry in the Pacific Islands: Systems for Sustainability (1993)

will be treated the same as

Agro forestry in the Pacific Islands Systems for Sustainability 1993

Query type

There are two different kinds of query.

Queries for all of the words. These look for documents (or
chapters, or titles) that contain all the words you have specified.
Documents that satisfy the query are displayed, in alphabetical
order.

Queries for some of the words. Just list some terms that are
likely to appear in the documents you are looking for. Documents are
displayed in order of how closely they match the query. When determining
the degree of match,

the more search terms a document contains, the closer it matches;

rare terms are more important than common ones;

short documents match better than long ones.

Use as many search terms as you like--a whole sentence, or even a whole
paragraph. If you specify only one term, documents will be ordered by its
frequency of occurrence.

Case sensitivity and stemming

Two pairs of buttons on the preferences page control the kind of
text matching in the searches that you make. The first set (labeled "case
differences") controls whether upper and lower case must match. The second
("word endings") controls whether to ignore word endings or not. It is
possible to get a large query box, so that you can easily do
paragraph-sized searching. It is surprisingly quick to search for large
amounts of text.

For example, if the buttons ignore case differences and
ignore word endings are selected, the query

African building

will be treated the same as

africa builds

because the uppercase letter in "African" will be transformed to
lowercase, and the suffixes "n" and "ing" will be removed from
"African" and "building" respectively (also, "s" would be removed from
"builds").